The Mechanics of Happiness

Engineering A Positive Approach To Your Life

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• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781600376962
• eBook ISBN: 9781614481164
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Salud mental y bienestar

The Mechanics of Happiness shows you how to live an enhanced life. Happiness, fulfillment and personal growth are the first steps on a journey of discovery that will revolutionize the way you view yourself and the world. Throughout the ages powerful knowledge has been kept hidden. Secrecy has prevented people from enjoying the proven benefits of having access to the greatest knowledge of all. Now you too can use these tools previously only available to the elite few to better understand your own life and its possibility. The most fundamental questions in all our lives are addressed in a simple and accessible way. Who am I? What is the purpose of life? How can I live the best life possible? Using easily applied methods your perceptions will be upgraded and your understanding refined. The Mechanics of Happiness is a tool kit, a user's manual for life and a cascade of gems that can enrich your life immeasurably. In your ongoing journey you need a companion, a mentor and a guide; The Mechanics of Happiness is those things and so much more, it is the springboard into a new way of thinking, a glimpse through a gateway to an alternative Universe.

Book One

Who Do You Think You Are?

Laying the foundations for personal growth and development

Introduction

We are the same, you and I. Driven by the same desires to grow and to improve. In our lives, irrespective of the outcomes, there are certain common drivers, influences experienced by us all that shape and define our human experience. This book is an introduction and a guide to many of those areas that may have seemed grey, mysterious or untouchable to you. It is a set of keys to a mansion that you may not have known you had access to and whose provenance transcends opinion. The very river of life flows through here, and for those with the eyes to see, this will be a touchstone of sanity and a source of nourishment to those parts of you that yearn for a deeper understanding of the enigma of life.

If you've ever asked yourself the question “Who am I?” then you need to study this carefully. If you've ever wondered why you do the things you do or were compelled to do something and asked yourself afterwards, “What did I do that for?” then you need to spend time here. Immerse yourself in this pool of knowledge and hopefully, with a little help, you will understand yourself and your situation more clearly. If life has all been a mystery to you and the outcomes seemingly random or arbitrary then you owe it to yourself to read on. This is a journey that we were all born to make, not everyone begins it, not everyone remembers it, we become distracted, forgetful and our lives become busy with ‘other things’. Sometimes it is only too late, when the race is run and the home straight is in sight that a person remembers what they had set out to accomplish. This volume is for you, as a reminder, as a primer and a lexicon into which you can dip for sustenance and inspiration.

The journey we make in our lives is criss crossed by questions such as “Who am I?”, “What can I do?”, “What is my true potential?” and a suite of other considerations. To say nothing of other people, the world we live in and becoming the best you that you can possibly be. This first section deals with the question “Who am I?” and is a location from which to begin.

The proposition of our lives is huge. At times this may even seem quite overwhelming. We are often poorly prepared or ill equipped to make sense of or understand what happens to us. The purpose of this work is to address these matters directly by shedding light on ideas that have been fundamental to and instrumental in the development of ourselves as individuals and the cultures that we have created and become a part of. This is not an exercise in blame but a celebration of the liberating and empowering force that knowledge and understanding represents. It has been said that life does not come with a user's manual; view this work as that user's manual. Complex and profound issues are made simple here, not simplistic but simplified so that they can be more easily understood.

This is a set of practical tools that will enable you to construct a body of insights that can transform your life. This is done by transforming some of the myths that surround our lives and considering them objectively. The only agenda here is empowering you.

What you are holding is a compendium of understanding and a treasure trove of knowledge for you to discover and explore. The greatest truths in life are the most simple. The most dynamic force for change is your understanding of your situation and how well informed you are to be able to take your life and create the thing you want it to be rather than put up with what it may have become.

The ideas in these volumes are springboards into an ocean of possibilities. They do not represent answers or solutions in themselves. They are the keys to understanding and underpin an elevated level of perception. The work that they represent is yours to do, should you so choose, and offer ways to approach that task you may not have encountered before. The reward for that work is the most precious of things, your personal emancipation. You do not know how close you are to greatness, it is a matter of small shifts in perception. This text will help you to place your feet upon the path that is the start of the most remarkable journey you will ever undertake. Treat it as a user's manual, a guide, refer to it often and try to embody the principles it describes.

The lessons and the knowledge contained here will be absolutely fundamental to you, irrespective of where or who you consider yourself to be. This work is for you, to help and assist, to illuminate the darkness that brings confusion and replace it with clarity and purpose.

Our journey starts here.

The journey ahead

Ultimately this journey of yours is about personal fulfillment and happiness. It's a trek without rights and wrongs and will have many course corrections en route. Before you there are two bodies of work that represent your potential guidance systems. If you are prudent you will look for guidance, you will try to find a mentor, someone or something who knows what it is you are after and you will then try to extract whatever gems you can from the mine that they represent. That is if you are wise and discerning, if you are not then it is of no concern to you because these words have already fallen on deaf ears and you have moved on to the next thing.

What are these two bodies of work? They are the synthesis of what other people have experienced and tried to formulate in ways that can be passed along to others. One is Academia, the other is the Self Help Movement.

Academia can be too rigorous, demand impossible proofs and serves only to make itself irrelevant to the vast majority of people—I know because along my journey I have gathered various degrees in philosophy and history and Academia flirts with the truly significant questions without really producing satisfactory answers. The Self Help Movement gets carried away with itself and elements of it have a tendency to over promise and make dubious claims that it can never really substantiate—I know this because I have met and studied with some of its leading lights; so while there are great things in there - this proneness to over hyping and under delivering damages its credibility.

These two consider each other with wariness from afar, resentful of their respective merits and feeling mutually threatened. Both camps have great strengths but need to be moderated. The silverbacks of each discipline regard the luminaries of their respective positions as misguided and refuse to give ground. You do not care about this, it is not your struggle, you simply want to know what is best to do for your own life.

Between the swings of a pendulum there is always a third way that embodies the best of each opposing discipline. Remember that here we are talking about personal fulfillment, happiness and self development, two camps believe they have the tiger by the tail but you are not aligned to either, you just want to progress and do the best you can with what you have at your disposal. Does that sound quite familiar to you?

Your journey towards leading a fulfilling and purposeful life is probably the most important adventure you will ever undertake. It will open doors to rooms you may never have known existed and will shed light upon a universe of possibilities that you may not have dared to imagine since you were a small child. This is what you were born to do.

Our world is in tumult, our societies and cultures experiencing shifts in attitude, expectation and hopes for the future. We are faced with a unique set of challenges that will stretch us, push us to the limit and demand a better set of responses than we have been able to muster so far. Think, if you were to grade the human race for the century just passed, what would you say? Surely the phrase ‘could do better' would be in there. This is a call to those many millions if not billions of you who feel this and know innately that extremism in its various forms is not the way forward. It is only the emancipation of individuals and their subsequent works that represent a reliable path into the future.

Most people consider themselves ordinary. This is a bit of a misnomer because there is no definition of ordinary other than what it is not—unexceptional and uninteresting; it's a bit like normal - subjective and flexible. A cannibal considers eating the flesh of their species normal behavior while you may consider it an aberration. So let's bury that notion, you are not ordinary, you sit as the chief executive within a portfolio of options any of which you may choose to exercise.

There is a certain type of individual that I have observed, we're a stratified lot we humans, no two the same and yet there are similarities, something we shall cover extensively in this work. These individuals are defined by something ‘other' about them, a particular quality or set of qualities that distinguish them from the crowd.

Have you ever wondered how we move forward? I don't mean our ambulatory skills; what carries us from caves to palaces, chariots to space shuttles, crude finger paintings on walls to Michelangelo's David, flint axes to laser beams, flat earth theories to quantum theories? There is a type of human and something propels them forward, causing them to aspire and reach for the next level of wherever they find themselves to be.

You know some of their names, they ring through history like precise notes in a cacophony, they are called Alexander, Newton, Einstein, Goethe, Gandhi, Hildegard, to mention but a few. They are your brothers and sisters, kindred, family. Exceptional individuals, leaders and pioneers who forged a way through the forests of confusion and charted hitherto unknown regions for the benefit of us all.

You see, we do not know what music sounded like before Mozart, we do not know how scientists saw things before Newton. These people arrived and pushed back the boundaries of current perception allowing all who came after them to fill the vacuum that they left in their wake. We are the beneficiaries of their originality, all of them, we might call them genius, visionaries, gifted, it makes no difference what we call them, the plain fact is that they advanced the cause of human development in their own way.

Understand that you follow in their footsteps and the world you know now will not always be this way, at the height of the Roman Empire its citizens could not conceive of a world without Rome and yet here we are. The Roman Empire is no more than a footnote in history, a tourist destination, something to take pictures of. What temples do we worship in, what edifices do we build that future generations will gaze upon with benign interest while teachers explain: “In that time they used to believe…”?

Imagination is the quality that carries us forward, daring to conceive of that which has yet to be. These great men and women saw that life is a ladder to be climbed, each step to be negotiated furthering the desire to understand more accurately our situation. The ladder, of course, is not linear but exists within a multi dimensional paradigm, moving and occupying different levels and territories simultaneously. Those who tune themselves into its frequency are carried along until their cognizance falters and they reach the limits of their understanding. We follow their paths and those who pick up the gauntlet that their example throws down endeavor to advance the perceptions that they caught. If this prospect does not fill you with awe and inspiration then you may already be defeated but we can work with that, we can snatch you from the jaws of such a predator. My sincere hope is that you ache with a desire to understand, to be of some use to yourself, your family, your community, to all of us who are connected by dint of our common humanity. Along such a path is found true happiness, true fulfillment and true purpose. You are blessed already that you have dreamed of such things, and here we will begin the process of giving these dreams structure and making good the promises that you have invested your belief in.

It needs to be said that development is not an exclusive option, only available to the rich and famous, the glamorous and the glitterati. Were that so then human life would be finished, meaningless. Happiness would be an impossible dream, a sense of purpose and meaning to your life a flight of fancy. True success is the person who does what they want to do, what they always wanted to do and what gives them the greatest sense of self-worth and fulfillment, be that being the best homemaker they can be, a great artist, a philosopher, a builder or a carpenter. It makes no difference; the developmental process is a human affair, not a social affair. It is your birthright and your greatest opportunity no matter what your origins, status, place in society or whatever other temporary criterion may have become attached to you.

To you who want to be better to refine and improve what you do, irrespective of what that is. To you who seek enlightenment, to you who seek fulfillment I offer this work that it may assist in developing your understanding further.

Where to begin?

The first question, the most urgent one that you need to grapple with and get a handle on is: “Who am I?”

When I set out upon my own journey of discovery, this particular question troubled me enormously. I just didn't know who or what I was and I didn't know how to approach it either. My life, as Churchill said, was an enigma wrapped in a mystery perched on the edge of a puzzle. The fact that I had no structure to my enquiry made it all the more challenging because I was not even sure whether it was the question I wanted to ask.

With hindsight I can see that my life had amounted to a series of reactions to circumstances and events that I could claim very little credit for. I was not the creator of my own situation, and while it is an emotive word to use I will use it here because I think it is appropriate, I was indeed the victim of circumstance.

There was little or no sense of ownership of my own life, a hostage to fortune and I floated as a jellyfish floats on shifting currents in the ocean. My grasp of what those currents were was probably no more accurate than the understanding a jellyfish has of its situation in life. I can not describe you that way because I don't know you personally but I would guess that you have felt similar things in your life to date. Am I hitting a “hot button” here?

This is the touchstone in a considered approach to achieving true emancipation and happiness, if you do not know who or what you are then a very difficult road lies ahead for you.

The implications of this are enormous. Your entire life will be determined by the factors surrounding the details of those constituents that collectively define and determine who you are. If you have never asked this question and been compelled to know the answer - then you have missed a huge window of opportunity, but it's never too late to start.

Understand that you are not a singular entity; you are a symphony of causes, effects, actions and reactions whose origins are often shrouded in confusion or lost with the passage of time. Let's imagine that the timeline of your life were the same as the earth's timeline. Much of your personal evolution occurred in the equivalent of your ‘p re-history’, before you were a thinking, aware being and when you were comparatively unsophisticated. What this work will do is pull the shrouds off those formative influences and examine them closely by retracing them in order that you may better understand your own situation and how you came to be who and what you are.

You are a collection of different ‘yous' gathered together and bound to one another, your life represents the confluence or coming together of many tributaries. You are a multiply aspected formation, a combination of causes merged into one another and perceived initially as one thing when the truth of the matter is quite different. There is a story of a group of Indian sages who are led to an elephant, each of them is blindfolded and asked to feel different parts of the elephant and describe what they feel. One describes the trunk, another describes the leg, another the ear and so on. All are quite accurate descriptions of the same thing but completely different.

This is the challenge that faces anyone trying to understand themselves, according to the focus of your attention at any one time you will be feeling or describing a different thing. Each of the factors contributing to the portrait that you are merits understanding in its own right. Without understanding you will remain an enigma, even to yourself, a mystery and an unknown quantity.

If you consider something huge, and you want to understand it, then it is necessary to break it down into more manageable parts or it becomes an overwhelming exercise. You are a complex piece of work—too huge to be considered with a cursory glance. We're going to begin by breaking the whole down into parts that are more readily assimilated. Consider yourself as a three vectored thing, three things rolled into one. These three aspects can be called:

1. The Fixed

2. The Fluid

3. The Infinite

Each of them is quite different and specific in its character and can be understood as the building blocks of who you are. The three components or ‘yous' are unique to you while all of us have them as a platform.

Understand the nature of these three and the original question, “Who am I?” becomes far more manageable. They are interwoven with one another and do not exist as separate entities in their own right, much as the major organs in your body are integral but separate. The areas they encompass are singular and can be seen as three distinct strands that maintain their own dynamism while functioning in association with their companions to create the expression of the whole.

Think of three lengths of wool, dyed different colors but plaited together, they represent one thing, the plait, while not losing their individual character. This is how these three correspond with one another and their interaction sets the tone of who you are. Let's consider in a little more detail what the three yous are.

The Fixed

This is an area of your life over which you have little or no influence. Its territory is the human design, your body, your genetics and those things that are like time release capsules such as puberty, hormonal shifts, the menopause, aging and so on. These are things that really you can only observe and respond to. You cannot change these aspects of yourself—oh, absolutely people can tinker with them, you may color your hair, visit the cosmetic surgeon and influence the perip...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Book 1–Who do You Think You Are?
• Book 2–What do You Think You're Doing?
• Book 3–Where do You Think You Are?
• Book 4–Why do You do What You do?
• Book 5–When is the Right Time?
• Book 6–How do You do It?
• Book 7–Doing and Being
• About the Author